Automating REST Security Part 3: Practical Tests for Real-World APIs

If you have read our two previous blogposts, you should now have a good grasp on the structural components used in REST APIs and where there are automation potentials for security analysis. You've also learned about REST-Attacker, the analysis tool we implemented as a framework for automated analysis.

In our final blogpost, we will dive deeper into practical testing by looking at some of the automated analysis tests implemented in REST-Attacker. Particularly, we will focus on three test categories that are well-suited for automation. Additionally, we will look at test results we acquired, when we ran these tests on the real-world API implementation of the services GitHub, Gitlab, Microsoft, Spotify, YouTube, and Zoom.

Author

Christoph Heine

Overview

• Part 1: Challenges in Analyzing REST Security
• Part 2: Tool-based REST Analysis with REST-Attacker
• Part 3: Practical Tests for Real-World APIs

Automating REST Security Part 2: Tool-based Analysis with REST-Attacker

Our previous blog post described the challenges in analyzing REST API implementations. Despite the lack of REST standardization, we learned that similarities between implementations exist and that we can utilize them for tool-based REST security analysis.

This blog post will now look at our own implementation. REST-Attacker is a free software analysis tool specifically built to analyze REST API implementations and their access control measures. Using REST-Attacker as an example, this blog post will discuss how a REST security tool can work and where it can improve or streamline the testing process, especially in terms of automation.

Author

Christoph Heine

Overview

• Automating REST Security Part 1: Challenges
• Automating REST Security Part 2: Tool-based Analysis with REST-Attacker
• Automating REST Security Part 3: Practical Tests for Real-World APIs 

Automating REST Security Part 1: Challenges

Although REST has been a dominant choice for API design for the last decade, there is still little dedicated security research on the subject of REST APIs. The popularity of REST contrasts with a surprisingly small number of systematic approaches to REST security analysis. This contrast is also reflected in the low availability of analysis tools and best security practices that services may use to check if their API is secure.

In this blog series, we try to find reasons for this situation and what we can do about it. In particular, we will investigate why general REST security assessments seem more complicated than other API architectures. We will likewise discuss how we may still find systematic approaches for REST API analysis despite REST's challenges. Furthermore, we will present REST-Attacker, a novel analysis tool designed for automated REST API security testing. In this context, we will examine some of the practical tests provided by REST-Attacker and explore the test results for a small selection of real-world API implementations.

Author

Christoph Heine

Overview

• Automating REST Security Part 1: Challenges
• Automating REST Security Part 2: Tool-based Analysis with REST-Attacker
• Automating REST Security Part 3: Practical Tests for Real-World APIs